The Growth of US Military Spending Over the Years

The OMB (Office of Management and Budget) has a page on their site that is devoted to the publishing of historical data (link below). There is all sorts of data published on the site - total government expenditures over the years, GDP over the years, etc.

Well, they show how much each agency in the government (such as Labor, Commerce, etc) spent per year from 1962 until present day, and they also show us each agency's spending at a total % of agency outlays. This can reveal interesting trends over the years.

For this article, we are going to focus on the country's Military spending from 1962 until 2010. In addition, we'll also include the government's projections for military spending from 2011 to 2015.

We will list four pieces of data (in regards to military spending) from 1962-2010 - Total Military Spending, Total Agency Outlays, Military Spending as % of Agency Outlays, Inflation Adjusted Military Spending. We will also include projections from 2011 to 2015.

As you can see, military spending was nearly 47% of agency outlays in 1962. This figure has slowly declined over the years, and was 18.6% in 2010.

This isn't due to military spending decreasing - instead, spending at other agencies has increased dramatically over the past 40-50 years. For instance, spending on Health and Human Services was just 3.3% of total agency outlays in 1962, and 23.3% in 2010.

As you can see from the data above, US military spending rapidly increased after 2001, roughly doubling (in inflation adjusted dollars) in just a decade.